Ascension

by Gregory Dowling

  Before I could form an answer to this question a dark shape filled the grey square, pushed the hinged window panes apart, hoisted itself on to the sill and leaped into the room. It was all done with supple speed and ease of movement; this was someone used to this mode of entering buildings.

  Even as it happened – even before the intruder landed on the floor – I let out a startled gasp. It was not a scream, I swear, just a gasp, but it was enough to give my visitor a start. Clearly he had not expected to find anyone in the room.

  I could have had the advantage at this point, but wakeful urgency clearly won out over sleep-befuddled confusion. The next instant the figure had hurled itself on to me and pinioned me to the bed, gripping both my arms. I lay there, frozen with terror, gazing up at a featureless black head, in which I could only make out the whites of the eyes. “Quickly,” it hissed. There was no corresponding movement of a mouth and the word sounded muffled, so presumably there was a full facial mask. In any case, I realised that the word was not directed at me. Confirmation came from further sounds of scrambling at the window.

  I twisted my head in that direction and saw another dark figure appearing there – larger and less supple than the one now holding me tight. Again it was impossible to distinguish any features.

  “What do you want?” I managed to say, but the next instant a hand was clamped over my mouth. The figure looming over me had released my right arm to do this, but the instant I raised that arm in a gesture of resistance, the other figure, now inside the room, had gripped it, and this grip was even tighter and harder than the previous one. A memory stirred somewhere inside me but there was no way I could wrestle it to the forefront of my mind; terror and confusion had full rein over my faculties for the moment.

  The two men exchanged a few grunting words, which I didn’t catch, and then I was hoisted to a sitting position and my arms were forced behind my back. The pricking sensation at my throat, I realised was caused by the point of a knife that was being held there by the larger man.

  I forced myself to concentrate on one thing at a time. These two men were clearly too strong for any effective physical resistance on my part. I was going to have to rely on my mental powers, and something told me that I might have the advantage there. Perhaps it was just the fact that they had not expected to find me at home; this suggested, at the very least, a failure in planning.

  “Where is it?” said the smaller man, in an urgent whisper.

  “Where is what?” I said, concentrating hard. That flickering memory of an instant ago must have meant something, I thought. I needed to track it down in the tortuous tunnels of my mind.

  “You know,” the sibilant voice said. “What the Englishman brought you.”

  Trouble, I thought; nothing else. Out loud I said, “He didn’t bring anything. He came here out of terror.”

  The knife-point pushed in a little way. Even as I gasped, I managed to grab hold of the coat-tails of that memory. The vice-like grip on my arm was extremely similar to the vice-like grip I had felt on my shoulder some weeks earlier at Fusina. And in my mind there loomed the figure of the walnut-faced man—who had pulled out a knife on that occasion, until told to put it away by the ganzer.

  And I made a further connection, linking the lithe movements of the ganzer, as I had seen him at Fusina and then in the streets of Venice, with the supple leap and spring of the first man, as he had scrambled into the room a minute earlier.

  I had no doubts. These were the same men. The ganzer was speaking in a deliberate breathy whisper, presumably to disguise his voice, but I thought I could identify it.

  Did this help me at all? If I were to say “I know who you are”, would they fall back, confounded, and then scramble over each other in a desperate attempt at flight? It seemed unlikely. Indeed, the fact that they were doing their best not to be recognised was an indication that they did not intend any fatal harm to me. It would be foolish to jeopardise that position.

  “Where is it?” the ganzer repeated.

  “Look, I swear I don’t know what you mean,” I said, with almost perfect honesty. I had an inkling what they were after, but certainly no idea where it was. I was sure Boscombe had not brought it with him.

  The ganzer was now kneeling on the bed behind me and he was busy tying my wrists with something. Presumably he was the kind of man who always travelled with a spare bit of rope in case he needed to manacle anyone. His voice came from right behind my left ear. “We can make you talk.”

  “Look, if I knew anything I would tell you,” I said, this time with absolute honesty.

  “Have a look around,” said the ganzer to the other man, shoving a piece of cloth in my mouth.

  The large man had found my candle and tinderbox, and flickering light was cast over the room. The two men were dressed in dark, tight-fitting clothes and both wore full facial masks – black ones, with no openings for the mouth. They had no cloaks and I imagined that this probably had something to do with the fact that they had planned to climb up to my window. I was only now getting to grips with the fact that they had somehow got up there. Had they used a ladder? It seemed unlikely, but so did any other solution.

  The big man began throwing things around in a totally unsystematic attempt at a search. I made pointless mmfffing sounds of protest, which were naturally ignored. After a minute or so the ganzer said: “This is a waste of time. Let’s take him where we can question him properly.”

  They blindfolded me with some greasy piece of cloth and then prodded me towards the door. My immediate fear now was of falling down the stairs without being able to put my hands out protectively, and as I reached the landing I began to shuffle cautiously until another shove from behind pushed me forward. I realised that one of them was now walking in front of me, which was a slight relief; my fall would not be unbroken.

  Somehow I got to the bottom of the stairs without injury and I felt the breeze as the leading man opened the front door.

  There was no sound outside. The two men hastened me along the salizada; then suddenly prodded me to the right. Unless I missed my guess we were now heading towards Calle del Pestrin; we reached it and turned left along it, which would bring us to the Rio di San Martin. There was no bridge here. Were they just going to shove me into the canal?

  But as we got to the water’s edge the big man jerked me to a halt with a hand on my shoulder. From the sounds that followed I gathered that the ganzer had lowered himself into a waiting boat; a few seconds later the big man, to my consternation, lifted me bodily and more or less dropped me after the ganzer. I found myself staggering on the swaying boards until steadied by the ganzer’s hands, and then I was rudely thrust into what I guessed, from the increased darkness and stuffy smell, to be a cabin. I found a seat and perched on it. A moment later the boat was moving.

  And now I lost all sense of orientation. Partly it was due to panic, partly to my attempt to concentrate my mind entirely on the question of what to do next; the two impulses were, of course, in conflict. I gradually forced the latter to quell the former, with the aid of slow, measured breathing and sheer force of will.

  I took stock of every part of my body, particularly my wrists, in an attempt to see what my chances of escape were. Wriggling and twisting and chafing my hands did not offer any real grounds for optimism. I turned my attention to the gag, and twisted my head so that it rested against the rough wood of the cabin wall; perhaps if I rubbed it hard I could work the cloth down …

  “Stop that!” came the ganzer’s voice. So I had not been left alone.

  I sat still. For want of anything better to do I listened hard to the outside noises to try to work out where we were. There was just the noise of the oar, the steady swishing of the water and an occasional human voice from a nearby house or street, but nobody saying anything useful like “What a lovely night, here in Campo Santa Maria Formosa.”

  I do not know how long we travelled; sheer terror can rob one of all sense of time and place. Eventually, though,
the boat came to a halt; I could hear it scrape alongside the stones of the canal bank before rustling noises told me that the big man was mooring it.

  The ganzer prodded me and I moved in the only direction I could – out of the cabin. One possibility was flickering in my mind: I could throw myself overboard. The splash would be some kind of signal, if anyone were around, and once in the water I should be able to work the gag out of my mouth. Would the water slacken or tighten the rope binding my wrists? I did not know, and the moment of hesitation as I pondered this point lost me the opportunity to find out, if that was what it had been. “No tricks,” muttered the ganzer, pushing me towards the side of the boat.

  There were some scrambling noises and the boat rocked wildly for a moment or two. It is only with hands tied behind the back and a blindfold over the eyes that one realises how much one relies on arms and sight for balance, reassurance and (obviously) contact with the world.

  Then I felt the big man’s hands grip me round the waist and I was heaved bodily, as helpless as a baby in swaddling clothes, on to firm ground.

  It was clearly the water gate of a building. There were slimy steps beneath my feet and the general atmosphere of enclosure and damp that comes from such spaces. Things seemed darker through the blindfold. I was prodded forward. A few more steps upward, then a corridor, and then another even more grimly enclosed space, where I was guided to a bench and made to sit.

  The two men conferred at a short distance, speaking in low and indistinguishable voices. Then the ganzer spoke to me. “Stay sitting there. Any move and you get it. Clear?” Then there was silence. After a minute or so it struck me that they might both have left and so I made a move to stand up.

  “Sit down.” It was the big man’s voice, a few yards away.

  I sat down. So the ganzer had gone. Why? To obtain more effective tools of coercion? I decided to concentrate all my mental efforts towards an assessment of my current situation. It was either that or go mad.

  Where was I? Once again I had that strange sensation of unexplained familiarity. There was something here that reminded me of places that I knew well. What was it? Well, given the circumstances it must have to do with either sounds or smells. Or possibly both.

  Sounds. At the moment there were very few. From outside there was just the faintest sloshing of canal water and the occasional cry of a seagull: we were still in Venice. Inside there was just the breathing of the big man and nothing else. I shifted on the bench and it creaked slightly. Nothing to get hold of there.

  Smells. Venice always offers an abundance of these, ranging from the delightful to the disgusting. Here I could smell nothing from the canal, neither the seaweedy tang of summer days at sunset nor the shitty stink of certain backwaters at low tide. And we were clearly a long way from any fish market or coffee shop or spice counter or fresh bakery; there was no hint of food or drink, just a musty but not unpleasant tickle in my nostrils that came from …

  Wood.

  That was it. A lot of wood.

  Not a sawmill or a carpentry shop: it was not the sweet pungency of sawdust-filled air, of freshly carved planks or poles, but the scent of a place where such planks or poles were used abundantly, where the floor and ceiling were of wood, which creaked when they were trodden on … a place where wooden objects were shifted around … a furniture shop? No, that would not explain the sense of familiarity.

  And suddenly I knew where we were. Or, at least, in what sort of place we were. It was one I knew well, one I had practically grown up in. We were in a theatre. And we were not sitting among the benches and stools of the spectator area; we were backstage.

  Even as I realised this my brain grasped another of the delicate sensations perceived by my nostrils: I could just sense the faint traces of paint that always hang around the storage places in theatres.

  And now I knew why the ganzer had always struck me as familiar: he was a zany. I had probably seen him on stage, in one of those frantic unscripted comedies in which he, as masked Harlequin, threw himself around the stage in a series of acrobatic comedy routines. The kind of routines that Goldoni, with his character-based plays and insistence on fidelity to the written script, was gradually making unfashionable. It was no surprise that no one had recognised my portrait of him; zanies always performed in masks. But his moving body had struck both me and Bepi as familiar.

  In strictly practical terms none of this made my situation any less problematic. It was not as if I could use my recognition of the location to effect an escape. But it did slightly – just slightly – take the edge off my fear. Somehow it was difficult to imagine a zany doing anything really terrible to me.

  I sat there mulling over this new knowledge. I even found myself dwelling on childhood memories: running around the dressing rooms of theatres all over England, wherever my mother was performing; being petted and spoiled by motherly actresses and singers, yelled at by directors and stage-hands; listening to good and bad music, to good and bad performances of Shakespeare and Dryden and new comedies from Italy … and then helping with the painting of scenery: daubing green woods for As You Like It and Scottish mountains for Macbeth and turbulent waves for The Tempest, and always getting in the way. I must have been insufferable at times.

  There were new noises from outside. A distant door being opened and closed; not the water gate this time. There were footsteps and quiet voices. I recognised the ganzer’s quick muttering. And a new voice, elderly and urgent; at least, that was my first impression. But I could not make out any words.

  The footsteps did not come into the space where we were. Instead, I heard the big man move towards the door – and then, I was almost sure, leave the room.

  I shifted on my bench. Nothing happened. I started to stand up. Still no reaction. So he had left me.

  Now I could hear the voices above me and the ceiling creaking, and my sense of location became even more precise. I was underneath the stage, and they had chosen to confer on the boards themselves. Perhaps that was the first place a zany would think of going – even for a secret talk.

  If there was one thing that was true of all stages in all theatres, it was that there was always the space for that most essential of links between front- and backstage: the prompter’s box. Probably they had not reckoned on my recognising where we were. I sat down again and slid along the bench in order to create the least possible noise. The muttering continued above me, and occasional shifting footsteps. At the far end of the bench I became aware that the sounds of the conversation were becoming definitely sharper. I stood up, keeping the wall to my left, and moved towards the voices. At a certain point I bumped against a wooden obstruction, which I worked out was a ladder. And now the words were distinctly audible. I had reached the point of access to the prompter’s box.

  “But why here?” This was the elderly man.

  “We need somewhere to question him, Excellency. Without anyone seeing or hearing.” This was the ganzer – the zany. He addressed the other man as ‘Excellency’; either he was a nobleman or the zany was one of those who scattered titles with sycophantic haphazardness. I guessed the former, and made the further guess that this was the man I had seen him talking to in the Piazzetta.

  “Do you think he knows anything?”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t seem very intelligent.” I decided to take that as a compliment to my acting skills.

  “What have you asked him?”

  “Just if he knows where it is.”

  “And you didn’t say what it is?”

  “No. But I’m sure he knows, Excellency.” So maybe my acting skills were not quite so well honed as I thought.

  “And how did you question him?”

  “Well, I just asked him. Nothing more.” There was a pause, and then the zany added, “Not yet.”

  Another pause. “Well,” said the nobleman, “are you going to question him…” another pause, “further? With other methods?”

  “That was why I wanted you to come. I thought
you might know what to do.”

  “Me?” This was a high-pitched Venetian “Mi?” I could not tell whether the tone were surprise, outrage or just panic. Then, as the nobleman continued, I guessed – to my surprise – that it was probably the last of these. Or at the very least it was nervousness. “Why should I know what to do?”

  “You’ve worked with the magistrates, Excellency,” said the zany. “You must have interrogated people. Used the rope.” I knew the rope: not for whipping, but for suspending a prisoner from a beam, sometimes for hours.

  “No, no … it’s hardly ever used now. It’s sometimes threatened, but that’s all.” Well, that was one state secret the old man’s colleagues would not be pleased to know he had revealed.

  “Well, let’s threaten him,” said the zany. “But you should do it. It will sound better coming from a new voice.”

  “All right. But if he doesn’t know anything, just get rid of him.”

  “You mean…?” The zany was clearly disconcerted.

  “Get rid of him. Take him away from here. Free him somewhere out in the lagoon or something.”

  “Ah.”

  I could sense relief on the zany’s part. I was getting the impression that these men were far from being the ruthless bloody bandits they wanted me to take them for. This did not make me any fonder of them, but for the first time I found the knot at the pit of my stomach slackening somewhat.

  “Hey,” said the zany suddenly. “What are you doing here?” For one panicky moment I thought I was visible to them; then I realised he must be addressing the big man.

  “I just wanted to know what you –” said the big man slowly.

  “Get back down there! He might have got free by now!”

  There was a sudden clatter of footsteps and I hastily shuffled back to the bench, trying to resume the same posture and position as before. I was just in time.